Nick D'Aloisio, aged 17, who developed the smartphone news app Summly, poses for a photograph at offices in central London March 26, 2013.

One of
Britain's youngest Internet entrepreneurs has hit the jackpot after selling his
top-selling mobile application Summly to search giant Yahoo.

Seventeen-year-old
Nick d'Aloisio, who dreamed up the idea for the content-shortening program when
he was studying for his exams, said he was surprised by the deal. As with its
other recent acquisitions, Yahoo didn't disclose how much it is paying for
Summly, although British newspapers suggested the deal's value at several
million dollars.

"I
would have never imagined being in this position so suddenly," he wrote on
his website, before thanking his family, his school — and his venture
capitalist backer Li Ka-Shing — for supporting him.

Summly
works by condensing content so readers can scroll through more information more
quickly — useful for the small screens of smartphones.

D'Aloisio
said he was the majority owner of Summly and would now invest the money from
the sale, though his age imposes legal limits for now on his access to it.

"I'm
happy with that and working with my parents to go through that whole
process," he said.

D'Aloisio,
who lives in the prosperous London suburb of Wimbledon, highlights the support
of family and school, which gave him time off, but also, critically, the ideas
that came with enthusiastic financial backers.

He had
first dreamt up the mobile software while revising for a history exam two years
ago, going on to create a prototype of the app that distils news stories into
chunks of text readable on small smartphone screens.

He was
inspired, he said, by the frustrating experience of trawling through Google
searches and separate websites to find information when revising for the test.

D'Aloisio
taught himself to code at age 12 after Apple's App Store was launched, creating
several apps including Facemood, a service which analysed sentiment to
determine the moods of Facebook users, and music discovery service SongStumblr.

He has
started A-levels - English final school exams - in maths, physics and
philosophy, and plans to continue his studies while also working at Yahoo's
offices in London. He aims to go to university to study humanities.

Although
he has created an app worth millions, D'Aloisio says he is not a stereotyped
computer geek.

"I
like playing sport," he said. "I'm a bit of a design enthusiast, and
like spending time with my girlfriend and mates."

The deal
announced Monday is Yahoo's fifth small acquisition in the past five months.
All of them have been part of CEO Marissa Mayer's effort to attract more
engineers with expertise in building services for smartphones and tablet
computers, an increasingly important area of technology that she believes the
Internet company had been neglecting.

D'Aloisio is younger than Yahoo, which was
incorporated in March 1995.